I use Mr. Sheen on our aircraft. Lemon Pledge isn't available here. Mr. Sheen seems to do the job just fine.

While you obviously see it as a privacy issue, and I agree it is, many people would probably see what you experienced as great service. The fact that you could close your account and then re-open it and not have to go through the trouble of re-uploading all the data and reconfiguring all your payment information would probably be seen as a great feature by many people.

My cousin lost her phone, and upon getting a new one was very thankful that all her contacts got restored onto the new phone. She didn't care that somebody else has access to her list of contacts. She only saw the plus side. Before the advent of cloud services, losing a cell phone or PDA (when they were still a thing) mean that you would loose your contact list. Being diligent about backing up the list to your desktop was very important so that you didn't lose data. Now all data is instantly synced, making our lives a lot easier.

Of course they can control their economic destiny. They could impose massive spending cuts, refuse to pay pensions, take big wage cuts and so on, and trigger the recession that way. But they'd rather not (no surprise)

This deserves an upvote. It's very hard to calculate the total cost of anything. Not only do we need to calculate the number of people who died building the nuclear plant, but we also have to count the number of people who died while mining the uranium including long term indirect health issues like lung cancer from inhaling radon gas.

We also need to discount any positive things from using either technology. What is the value to increased spending money from whichever technology is cheapest for the end consumer? How does that compare to paying more for something that ultimately increases lifespans? Is it better to live a bit shorter and be richer, or live longer and be poorer?

Bitcoin is not actually deflationary. Its supply grows constantly until it eventually stabilises. The fact that Bitcoin prices have fallen a lot is more because lots of new people have discovered the project and decided they want some, but that effect will eventually peter out as Bitcoin becomes boring and everyone finalises their opinions of it.

Greece doesn't need fiat currency. What Greece needs is hard money – like the Euro (which is hard-ish, though not as hard as Bitcoin). This is because the Greek government is notoriously corrupt and the fact that they couldn't just print the pensions of their civil servants was one of the few things creating pressure to reform, and preventing outright pillaging of the savings of Greeks who do actually work in the private sector. Seeing Greece as one monolithic entity isn't right: there are different factions, not all of whom want the government to suddenly be able to spend whatever it wants. Hence the Greek people apparently voting for both keeping the Euro and not enacting any spending cutbacks, a contradictory position.

Ultimately Greece is going to get a lot poorer, no matter what. In many ways it's practically a third world country, one that was simply kept afloat by huge injections of foreign cash. But it never really stopped being third world in the way that it was run.

Bitcoin could, theoretically, benefit some Greek people now in the heat of the crisis because the Greek government wouldn't be able to impose capital controls on it. Thus preventing the outright theft of whatever little cash Greek's have left in the bank (sorry, I mean, solidarity tax/haircut/pick euphemism of choice). It is no magical cure for Greece's problems but it could tip the balance away from a government that discovered it was paying salaries and pensions for entirely non-existent departments, and towards people who are just trying to make a living.

Lots of things can be considered an API. For instance, who owns the copyright on OpenGL? Does anyone even know? What about HTTP? After all, a protocol is basically an API that runs over wires instead of call stacks. And HTTP/2.0 is a derivative work of SPDY which is .... developed by Google. And is now being added back into Java. What about SQL? It's managed by ISO these days so probably Oracle would avoid slicing their own throats like this.

Following this US ruling all sorts of people and companies are now finding that they own IP they never even knew they had. This is already making lawyers the world over start licking their lips. It's going to be a shitstorm.

You have a good point...

If we are willing to live in primitive conditions worse than our current prison population and if other governments give us free weapons to resist the u.s. government we could probably do the same in the mountainous and densely wooded areas of the country.

Of course they will (and do). They want their customers to have a great experience so they don't go to the competition. Hence the ability to review drivers, hence the automated calculation of the trip cost and so on.

It's systematically ignoring laws and regulations while going "wah wah, we're teh underdogs".

Uber is not unregulated and they do not stand in opposition to regulations in general, contrary to what many seem to believe.

What we're witnessing here is not State Vs Anarchy Round One. What we're witnessing is quite simply State Regulation vs Corporate Regulation. The existential question Uber faces is, can they convince society and government (not the same thing) that they're better at regulating taxi drivers via their technology than local taxi commissions are via paperwork? Even if Uber triumphs, this will not mean widespread usage of unregulated taxis, it just means that taxi drivers will live in fear of getting low star ratings instead of having their local medallion revoked.

Getting drunk and running amok is something you do when not home--at home you might exercise some moderation, or there'd be people who'd call you out on it whose authority you'd feel obligated to respect

I hate to say it, given that I'm British, but unfortunately the problem of a subset of Brits getting completely wasted and engaging in shitty, boorish behaviour isn't something restricted to holiday times. For some reason the UK just has a far more serious problem with drinking than other cultures and it happens at home as well. I normally don't go to the sort of European resort towns that the hooligan set like to frequent but on the occasions that I have done, it's always embarrassing as fuck to be a young male British tourist because you can sense the suspicion locals have that you might be about to do something stupid. The worst was when I visited Bratislava. Lovely city (well, town, by UK standards). The pub in the city centre had the phone number of the British embassy on the beer mats, for people to call in an emergency. The men's toilets had a poster warning Brits specifically not to hit on the local girls. When I was there, a group of Brits came in with some unbelievably grotesque, obese men being led by some extremely hot local girl. Very obviously a stag do. As one of the fattest guys walked past the table where me and my friend were sitting he said (very loudly) "I want to see some TITS".

I pretended to be Canadian. Luckily I don't have a strong British accent at all and I was travelling with an American, so it was somewhat plausible.

I think you're completely right that this behaviour is partly learned and transmitted, like some sort of mind virus. For some reason Brits seem far more likely than other people to feel they can't have fun or be socially relaxed until they've got drunk, and will happily admit it. It's not seen as something shameful, people just blurt it out, like saying it somehow makes them one of the group. Combine it with a culture that practically celebrates "laddishness" as being fundamental to being a man, and you've got a recipe for trouble.

It's really the screen that drains the battery when you're using it as a GPS. Or at least it should be. I've been tracking my bicycle commutes on my phone. And even during my 40 minute ride when I take the long route, the battery doesn't drop more than a couple percent.

  Then again, I have a Windows phone. It's ridiculous how little battery this thing uses if you aren't actively using is. I've finished the day with 80% battery left because I was particularly busy. Even when I use it a lot, I rarely get below 60%.

My previous phone was Android and it would drain the battery to 20% be the end of the day, even if I didn't use it. I basically had to leave it plugged in at work or it wouldn't make it through the day.

I agree with this. People shouldn't discount electric cars based on the fact that they may want to drive far a couple times a year. Especially with so many people owning two cars. Even 100 miles should be plenty for commuting. If you're spending more time than that in a car every day, I wouldn't want to be you. That's way too much time wasting away in a car.

There's a whole lot of them. Almost every ethical theory seriously entertained by contemporary philosophers (many if not most of which theories support some concept of rights) is something other than divine command theory ("from God") or ethical subjectivism ("people just made it up").

The oppression and racism thing ended down here back in the 60's. You just don't see that here anymore and no..the Stars and Bars for my lifetime has not been use or seen as something for oppression. It was a backdrop for a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert, nothing more than that level of southern pride thing.

You speak as an outsider that knows nothing of life down here in the SE USA.

I don't know what you're referring to so I'm going to go with "no", but I also get the feeling that you completely missed my point.

Does logic come from God or is it just something people made up?

Does mathematics come from God or is it just something people made up?

Does reality come from God or is it just something people made up?

Does morality come from God or is it just something people made up?

False dichotomies, all of that. (And not even a dichotomy at that, because "coming from God" means someone -- God -- made it up. "Nobody made it up, it just is" isn't an option?)